You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss — A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate “team-building” exercises. — They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working …

Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism — I have tremendous respect for Paul Graham. His essays— repackaged in the book Hackers and Painters— are among the best writing I've found on software engineering. Not all of them are so great, of course, but the majority are well worth your time.

The Royalty Scam — LAST week at South by Southwest, the rock music conference held every year in Austin, Tex., the talk in hotel lobbies, coffeeshops and the convention center was dominated by one issue: how do musicians make a living in the age of the Internet?

The Thin Skin of Apple Fans — IN his new book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society,” Farhad Manjoo, a writer for Salon, argues that “new communications technologies are loosening the culture's grip on what people once called ‘objective reality.’ ”

Wine 1.0: Coming soon to a computer near you — After nearly 15 years of development, the WINE project is scheduled for the landmark 1.0 release. As with most open source programs, it is hard to sit back and say “ok it's done”. The work will always continue, but at some point the program …

wikinear.com, OAuth and Fire Eagle — I'm pleased to announce wikinear.com. It's a simple site that does just one thing: show you a list of the five Wikipedia pages that are geographically closest to your current location. It's designed (or not-designed) to be used mainly from mobile phones.

A Translation of “Apple's Windows Invasion” — A translation from Windows-speak of selected portions of “Apple's Windows Invasion”: — Apple have been trying to get in the front door for ages, and now, like evil hackers, they're using back doors. I don't choose these phrases lightly, you know.

Eating our words: Apple's Mac mini to rock on — Apple Inc.'s Mac mini, a tiny desktop system previously pegged for extinction, won't fade into the distance after all, at least not yet. — Last Memorial Day, AppleInsider cited sources in reporting that it appeared to be the end of the line …

Hazards of Wifi — Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council meeting to make the claim that wireless caused health problems in general and to them specifically.